The only hints of trouble in the big beige house on Como Lane were the newspapers in the driveway and the lack of any activity behind the front door.

But when police summoned by worried friends of the residents got inside Monday, they found a horror _ six members of a family fatally shot in a murder-suicide committed by an unemployed father in financial crisis.

The body of 45-year-old Karthik Rajaram, a gun clutched in one hand, was found by officers who followed a trail of carnage through the home in a gated community in the Porter Ranch area of the San Fernando Valley.

His victims, most slain in their beds, were his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law.

"Absolute devastation," Deputy Chief Michel Moore told reporters outside the home.

Investigators quickly found two suicide letters and a will, and determined that Rajaram held a master's degree and once worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a major accounting firm, and for Sony Pictures.

But he had been unemployed for several months and his finances had reached a crisis point in recent weeks, Moore said.

"This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole, if you will, of absolute despair," Moore said. "It is critical to step up and recognize we are in some pretty troubled times."

Rajaram wrote in his suicide letter that he felt he had two options _ to kill himself or to kill himself and his family _ and decided the second option was more honorable, Moore said. The gun was purchased Sept. 16.

The bodies were found when officers were sent to make a check on the home Monday morning after the wife, Subasri, 39, failed to show up at a neighbor's home for her ride to work as a pharmacy bookkeeper, Moore said.

Officers found the mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, dead in bed on the first floor. Upstairs, they found Subasri Rajaram dead in one room, and the 19-year-old son, Krishna, a college student, dead in another, Moore said.

In a third room, 12-year-old Ganesha was dead on the floor, and his 7-year-old brother, Arjuna, was dead in bed. Their father's body was nearby with a handgun "in his grasp," Moore said.

Coroner's assistant chief Ed Winter said the victims were shot multiple times, sometime between midnight Saturday and early Monday morning.

Rajaram had no record of mental disabilities or contacts with mental health professionals in Los Angeles County, Moore said.

But one of Rajaram's co-workers at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Greg Robinson, told the Los Angeles Daily News that he had hired Rajaram to work at his management consulting agency, but then fired him in 2005 after seeing erratic behavior.

"He would miss phone calls and miss meetings and sometimes couldn't be found for a couple of days," Robinson said. "There obviously was some kind of under-story to his life that we weren't aware of." Continued...